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Monday, February 6, 2012

Haitham Maleh, a member of the executive committee of the Syrian National Council, told The Daily Telegraph that Mr Assad had forfeited any chance of a peaceful exit from Syria as a result of his regime's brutal crackdown on protesters.

The former judge, who has spent decades in Syrian prisons for his human rights activism, predicted that Mr Assad, his wife and three children would be killed in revenge for his failure to respond positively to peaceful demands for change.

"Assad and his family will be killed in Syria, their next steps will be very bloody," he said. "Two months ago we offered him the option to leave us alone and go but instead he went for the blood of his people. The end for him will be that he is killed like Gaddafi."

One of their long-shot rivals, former senator Rick Santorum, told the same audience he hoped US assets were behind a recent deadly explosion at a missile base in Iran and vowed to put the world on notice of secret US operations.Newt Gingrich

WASHINGTON — US health authorities on Friday urged all boys age 11-12 to get a routine vaccination against the most common sexually transmitted disease, human papillomavirus, or HPV.

Other changes as part of an annual update to US immunization schedules included a recommended hepatitis B vaccine to the protect the livers of adults up to age 60 who have diabetes and a vaccine against whooping cough for pregnant women.

The updates, agreed upon by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), were published in the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly report of February 3.

Last Friday the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that in the first month of this new year 243,000 jobs were created and the unemployment rate (U.3) fell to 8.3 percent. This good news is a mirage. It is due to faulty seasonal adjustments and to the BLS birth/death model. In a prolonged downturn, seasonal adjustments and the birth/death model produce nonexistent employment.

The unadjusted data show a rise in the unemployment rate. The birth/death model, which estimates the net effect of jobs lost from business failures and jobs created by new start-ups was designed for a normal growing economy, not for a prolonged downturn four years old. Statistician John Williams (shadowstats.com) reports that the BLS adds 48,000 new jobs per month to the payroll employment report based on the birth/death model even though the economy has not come out of the deep recession. In other words, over the course of a year, the birth/death model adds about 580,000 jobs to the reported jobs numbers. End of year benchmark revisions quietly take the nonexistent jobs out of the totals, but these revisions do not receive headlines and pass largely unnoticed.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- U.S. taxpayers likely lost $1.3 billion in the government bailout of Chrysler, the Treasury Department announced Thursday.

The government recently sold its remaining 6% stake in the company to Italian automaker Fiat. It wrapped up the 2009 bailout that was part of the Troubled Asset Relief Program six years early.

"The fact that the company has done so well -- that they were able to go out and raise private capital to repay us the loan so quickly, is really the big story," said Tim Massad, Treasury assistant secretary for financial stability.